discusses a lot about the potential of the world’s “poor.”

we should wake up to the functioning of their economic systems and work to integrate them into the grander scheme of things, should they find themselves unable to come together as “Pooristan”

Poor countries lack many things but for me, the most important thing they lack is education. Many poor countries (like Angola) have among the best and most natural resources and still they are poor nevertheless. Many argue that developed/rich countries exploit those poor countries to their benefit but, as cruel and inhumane as it may sound that fact is: what country do not exploit (or should I say: try to create the best deal for it) when doing international business? Rich countries invest in each others and of course each one is trying to get the best deal for itself possible. Even poor countries try to do it. So why is that (till now) most deals seems to be bad for poor countries? I believe it is because of the huge educational divide between the rich and the poor. But this divide is disappearing and so soon we will start seeing poor countries turning down deals that are clearly not to their advantage.

The route from a tribal-familial social organization, to an affiliation of functioning nation-states based on a common status of poverty, is not a road that will ever be built.

The West’s recent in-your-face exposure to the tribal reality in the Middle East should clarify some of the main obstacles.

Tribally-organized areas, even the ones with great oil wealth, haven’t gotten beyond the entropy of their political tradition, where kinship= social structure, to create stable, enduring, functional national superstructures.

Next problem: The “bottom billion” are even more isolated from their geographically distant poor counterparts than they are from whatever upward mobility may exist in their current country.

Land is primary. Affiliations where economic status trumps adjacency have no precedent, and more importantly, no practicality. There’s just no practical sense to the idea that stable affiliations–at a meta-level, no less–can be forged and maintained based on economic status.

And finally: Pooristan is held out as an economic Utopia. But, the fact that things begin to get better for some will instantly work to de-stabilize Pooristan, should such an entity ever get one gram of traction in the first place.